Market On Open - Friday 26 January

Whump - There It Is!

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Gunslinger Shoots Down The Nasdaq

Intel is on a mighty tear these days, delivering 100% gains from the February 2023 lows to the January 2024 highs. Not too shabby for one of Silicon Valley's old folks. This success is down to four factors. One, the need for the US to re-shore advanced semiconductor manufacturing as a pre-emptive hedge against any annexation of Taiwan (where TSMC lives) by China. Two, the absence of any viable candidate save for Intel to be able to do that at scale. Three, the shovelfulls of money tossed Intel's way courtesy of the CHIPS Act (see One and Two for its logic). And four, the new-ish CEO at Intel, Pat Gunslinger. Gelsinger. Sorry.

Intel printed a solid quarter yesterday; the stock dumped - it's down 12%-ish in pre-market trading at the time of writing. Talking heads will tell you that's because of something called guidance. You know that is just ex post facto rationalization. Because you know the real reason it dumped is that it had already run up a lot. Time for bigs to cash some gains, to scare any civilians who piled in late, and generally to shake down smalls for some free money before going again.

Intel Since The Financial Crisis Depths

You can click here for a full page version of this chart.

Anyway, INTC properly scared the horses. SOXX freaked out first (in staff personal accounts we used this to scoop some free-money gains in SOXS, real-time alerted ahead of time for our paying members here at Inner Circle as always). Then Nasdaq got wind of the trouble in the fields and got skittish, coming so soon after the fright from Tesla earnings the day before. The Nasdaq-100 is down about 1% at the present time, as you will see from the QQQ, NQ and TQQQ charts below. And the slower-twitch S&P is wondering about whether to dump. Now down around 0.4%.

Whether this all gathers momentum and sees a material correction to the incredible bull run since October 2023, no clue. We'll watch it in real time as always, and react to what is actually happening to price, rather than what our pathetically jumpy limbic brains tell us might happen to price.

OK. Now onto our usual charts. Paying members of Inner Circle, scroll down for our long- and short-term take on the S&P500, the Nasdaq-100, the Dow Jones 30 and the Russell 2000 - including the regular ETFs, the futures, the 3x leveraged ETFs and then finishing with a take on sector ETFs in semiconductor, tech, and the Fangs. Phew! Let’s go! (Not a paying member? Sign up right here. If you’re not sure about committing, just take the monthly. If you like it and want to take an annual, we’ll deduct that first month’s fee so you’re not out of pocket. If you hate it, you’re down only $299).

Note - to open full-page versions of these charts, just click on the chart headings, which are hyperlinks.